MUSIC

ARCHITECTURE

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Music & Architecture Ways of Listening

Contents

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Introduction Kiera Blakey

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Introduction Kiera Blakey

Music and Architecture is an ongoing workshop series organised by

Theatrum Mundi, a professional network of academics, architects,

planners, performing and visual artists, hosted by LSE Cities. The aim is

to bring together a diverse group of practitioners to discuss in small and

informal groups, the relationship between physical space and musical

space. The first workshops were divided into four parts: Harmony,

Rhythm, Melody and Narrative, and Porosity.

The topic arose from Theatrum Mundi founder, Richard Sennett.

Perspective, distance, height, balance, proportion, weight, density, light,

colour and mass are fundamental elements within our experiences of

both music and architecture. For architecture to come into existence,

boundaries of physical space must be defined and for music, boundaries

within our experience of time need be defined. So can an architect who

sculpts and shapes physical space, learn from a musician who creates

virtual environments of musical space?

The four discussions saw musical software developers, classical and pop

musicians, an acoustician, choreographers, architects, urbanists and

social scientists discuss topics such as whether some rhythmic forms

– either of musical composition or a city plan – can be compelling and

others monotonously repetitive. Whether the disjunction between linear

structures in architecture, such as the sequential convergence towards

a place like the Champs Élysées, might compare to a crescendo or climax

in music. How might the endless shopping street compare to loops

in music and what does this do to the way we listen to music, perform

it, and inhabit and transform space?

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The four contributions in this publication represent the breadth of

conversation that arose from bringing together a multidisciplinary

group. It’s interesting that despite vast gaps between genre, profession

and experience, a core thread links each contribution – the notion of

an unfinished, non-fixed or open space, whether that be in the design

of porosity and presence in musical venues as in Richard Sennett’s

contribution or in challenging our experience of listening to recorded

material in the contribution from Lexxx Dromgoole and Gwilym Gold.

The title of this publication takes its name from architect Andrew Todd,

an active member of Theatrum Mundi. It reflects the contributions from

both Ronan O’Hora, how do we really hear what’s around us, and Laura

Marcus – might we come to ‘listen’ to a house, street or town as an

audience does to a symphony.

Theatrum Mundi’s role is that of provocateur and enabler where ideas

that link the arts and urbanism can be questioned, discussed and

debated. Founded in 2012, the project is currently based in London

and New York, with partnerships and projects in Frankfurt, Berlin, and

Copenhagen. It organises workshops for small groups, salons which

are slightly larger discussions, conferences for the public, exhibitions

and research.

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Rhythm-Studies

Laura Marcus

Laura Marcus is Professor of English Literature, New College,

University of Oxford and Goldsmiths College London. Her book

publications include Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory,

Criticism, Practice (1994), Virginia Woolf: Writers and their

Work (1997/2004) and The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema

in the Modernist Period (2007; awarded the 2008 James Russell

Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association).

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Rhythm-Studies Laura Marcus

‘Rhythm is the fundamental and vital quality of painting, as of all the arts

– representation is secondary to that, and must never encroach on the

more ultimate and fundamental demands of rhythm’ – Roger Fry1

The critic John Middleton Murry, writing of his conversations with the

Scottish painter J.D.Fergusson in the early decades of the twentieth

century, recalled (in his autobiography Between Two Worlds):

One word was recurrent in all our strange discussions – the word

“rhythm”. We never made any attempt to define it; nor ever took any

precaution to discover whether it had the same significance for us

both. All that mattered was that it had some meaning for each

of us. Assuredly it was a very potent word.

For Fergusson [rhythm] was the essential quality in a painting or

sculpture; and since it was at that moment that the Russian ballet

first came to Western Europe for a season at the Châtelet, dancing

was obviously linked, by rhythm, with the plastic arts. From that, it

was but a short step to the position that rhythm was the distinctive

element in all the arts, and that the real purpose of ‘this modern

movement’ – a phrase frequent on Fergusson’s lips – was to reassert

the pre-eminence of rhythm.2

In Fergusson’s reported sentiments there is the suggestion that ‘this

modern movement’ had come into being, or had found its true function,

1 A Roger Fry Reader, ed. Christopher Reed (University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 105-6.2 John Middleton Murry, Between Two Worlds: An Autobiography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), pp.

155-6.

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in the reassertion of ‘the pre-eminence of rhythm’. In this account,

modernism rediscovers or recovers a rhythm, whose centrality, it is

implied, had become submerged. Fergusson (in Murry’s account)

represents ‘rhythm’ as the ‘quality’ which cuts across the divisions

between the arts, although the fact that they made no attempt to define

the ‘quality’ leaves open the possibility (perceived by the more cautious

Murry) that ‘rhythm’ in the various and different arts is to be understood

as a homonym rather than as an identity.3

The absence, or refusal, of strict ‘definition’ alluded to by Murry has as

one of its contexts the vitalism (with its resistance to classification and

differentiation) to which ‘rhythm’ was central, and which is part of that

‘great hymn to energy’, in Jacques Rancière’s phrase, sung by artists and

thinkers in the early twentieth century. Rancière brings ‘rhythm’ into this

energetic field in his quotation from the modernist writer and critic Blaise

Cendrars: ‘Rhythm speaks. You are … Reality has no meaning any more.

Everything is rhythm, speech life ... Revolution. The dawn of the world

today’. Rancière comments: ‘The new common term of measurement,

thus contrasted with the old one, is rhythm, the vital element of each

material unbound atom which causes the image to pass into the word,

the word into the brush-stroke, the brush-stroke into the vibration of

light or motion’.4 In this passage from image to word to brushstroke to

photographic/cinematographic image (these technologically mediated

forms being one way of interpreting ‘the vibration of light or motion’) we

find a desire to (re)connect artistic or aesthetic forms which had been

artificially divided into the arts of space and the arts of time, or into the

3 Wendy Steiner uses these terms to explore ‘interart analogies’ – in particular the perceived

relationship between painting and literature – in her The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation

between Modern Literature and Painting (University of Chicago Press, 1982).4 Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 44-5.

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verbal and the plastic arts. (The desire for ‘a new Laokoön’ is one aspect

of this newly constituted field of connections.)

Murry, Fergusson and Cendrars were writing from the perspectives of a

modernity in which ‘the dawn of the world today’ was the beginning of

a new century. Fergusson’s ‘little magazine’ Rhythm (1911–13) emerged

from this context, and reveals the influence of a vitalist philosophy

strongly influenced by the writing and thought of Henri Bergson. A

full understanding of the meanings of ‘rhythm’ for the modern period

requires, however, a longer historical perspective, beginning with

exploration of the late nineteenth century in a range of contexts:

philosophy, experimental psychology, science, music, aesthetics, art and

literature. The analysis of ‘rhythm’ was central to all these fields. As or

more significantly, ‘Rhythmics’ was in the process of formation at this

time as an area of study, or a discipline, in its own right. As in the case of

‘ethology’ (the science of the study of character, which John Stuart Mill

had worked to develop as an independent discipline), ‘rhythmics’ could

be understood as a field of thought or a science which failed to achieve

the institutional or conceptual status imagined for it. It was at once

all pervasive and, in disciplinary terms, homeless. It eluded definition

in ways which, in the field of poetics as well as science, produced in

some contexts ever more detailed and determined attempts to take its

measure, though in others its very amorphousness as a concept was its

most significant, productive and creative feature.

The concepts of ‘rhythm’ as motion and as connectivity, two of the

central topics that emerge in Herbert Spencer’s influential writings

on ‘The Direction and Rhythm of Motion’, in his First Principles of a

New System of Philosophy (1862). In Chapter X of the volume, ‘The

Rhythm of Motion’, Spencer argued for the omnipresence of ‘rhythm’,

building up from the physical world and its laws to the realms of social

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organisation and human creative activity. ‘Rhythmical action’ – initially

defined through the terms of ‘vibration’ and ‘undulation’ - is to be found

in the impact of a rising breeze on a becalmed vessel or, on land, in the

‘conflict between the current of air and the things it meets’: ‘The blades

of grass and dried bents in the meadows, and still better the stalks in the

neighbouring corn-fields, exhibit the same rising and falling movement’.

For Spencer all motion is rhythmical, and the physical universe exists

in a mode of perpetual motion which he defines in terms of ‘a conflict

of forces not in equilibrium’: ‘If the antagonist forces at any point are

balanced, there is rest; and in the absence of motion there can of course

be no rhythm’.

Spencer found rhythm not only at the largest levels (in, for example,

geographical processes) but in the bodily processes – ingestion,

excretion, pulsation – of each individual organism, and in human

consciousness, whose rhythm he defined in the terms of a departure

and return from and to mental states and feelings. A more conspicuous

rhythm, ‘having longer waves’, he argued, ‘is seen during the outflow of

emotion into dancing, poetry, and music. The current of mental energy

that shows itself in these modes of bodily action is not continuous but

falls into a succession of pulses’. The rhythmic dimensions of aesthetic

expression start from the body, and ‘the bodily discharge of feeling’, and

their naturalness is proven by the fact that they are also revealed in the

cadences – the rise and fall - of ordinary speech.

Spencer’s terms and concepts are important for two particular

dimensions of ‘rhythmics’. The first, exemplified in his focus on the ‘bodily

discharge’ of ‘feeling’, is the centrality of ‘rhythm’ to the ‘kinaesthetics’

and ‘physiological aesthetics’ which developed in the late nineteenth

century, in the work of thinkers including the biologist Grant Allen, the

psychologist Havelock Ellis and the philosopher Vernon Lee. The second

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line of exploration is that of the impact of theorizations of rhythm, in its

definitions as ‘pulsation’, ‘conflict of force’, ‘continuous motion’ and ‘rise

and fall’, on the aesthetic theories and the literature of the period. Walter

Pater, in the Conclusion to his collection of essays The Renaissance,

famously described Life as consisting of a limited number of pulses,

adding: ‘For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as

many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give

us this quickened sense of life’.

Concepts of ‘rhythm’ (often linked to ‘periodicity’, as in the theories of

Wilhelm Fliess and Sigmund Freud) were also closely linked to models

of sexuality and gender at the turn of the century. Marie Stopes used

the concept of ‘a fundamental rhythm of feeling’ in women (to be

represented as ‘a succession of crests and hollows as in all wave-lines’) to

argue that ‘woman has a rhythmic sex-tide which, if its indications were

obeyed, would ensure not only her enjoyment and an accession of health

and vitality, [but] would explode the myth of her capriciousness … We

have studied the wave-lengths of water, of sound, of light; but when will

the sons and daughters of men study the sex-tide in woman and learn the

laws of her Periodicity of Recurrence of desire?’5

Stopes’s insistent metaphorising of the concept of ‘rhythm’ in relation

to waves and water indicates the widely held but mistaken view that the

etymology of ‘rhythm’ is ‘rhein’, deriving from the observed ebb and

flow of ocean waves. In the later twentieth century, linguists (including

Emile Benveniste) showed that ‘rhythmos’ was, in ancient Greek tragedy

and philosophy, synonomous with ‘skhema’ or ‘form’, but that whereas

‘skhema’ is to be understood as a fixed form, ‘rhythmos’ is form in

5 Marie Stopes, Married Love (London: Putnam, 1917), p. 57.

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motion, fluid and changeable. ‘Rhythmos’ is thus to be understood as

‘the particular manner of flowing’. This understanding of ‘rhythm’ as

movement and ‘becoming’ can be traced through from Nietzsche to

Bergson and his modernist followers and detractors in literature and

the visual arts. The relationship of late Victorian and modernist writers

and thinkers to Classical aesthetics and culture also becomes crucial.

It was fundamental to Nietzsche’s distinctions between the ‘rhythms’

of Classical and Modern thought, which come to define the different

concepts of time, historicity and cultural formation in the two periods.

While Nietzsche, trained as a philologist, must be assumed to have

known the derivation of the term, the desire of numerous other writers

and thinkers of the period to connect ‘rhythm’ (etymologically and

conceptually) with natural and organic processes is highly significant –

a ‘creative misprision’ on a major scale. The metaphors of the ‘pulse’ and

the ‘heart-beat’, as well as of waves, come to define concepts of ‘rhythm’

in a very wide range of contexts. One dimension of the fascination with

‘rhythm’ in the period arose from the desire to reclaim or retain human

and natural measures in the face of the coming of the machine and the

speed of technological development.

Many of the ‘rhythm-scientists’ of the late nineteenth- and early

twentieth centuries defined rhythm as the antithesis of both stasis

and continuous motion: it was for them not a straight line but a

wave. A similar distinction would be drawn by Henri Lefebvre, whose

‘rhythmanalysis’ rests on a differentiation (though also a relationship)

between ‘linear’ and ‘cyclical’ time. The work of art, he argued:

displays a victory of the rhythmical over the linear, integrating it

without destroying it. Cyclical repetition and linear repetition meet

and collide. Thus, in music the metronome supplies a linear tempo;

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but the linked series of intervals by octaves possesses a cyclical and

rhythmical character. Likewise in daily life: the many rhythms and

cycles of natural origin, which are transformed by social life, interfere

with the linear processes and sequences of gestures and acts.6

These complex processes would be the subject, for Lefebvre, of

rhythmanalysis, ‘a new science that is in the process of being constituted

… [which] situates itself at the juxtaposition of the physical, the

physiological and the social, at the heart of daily life’.7 In further and

fuller writings in this field of study, Lefebvre argued that ‘rhythm’ was

the most fundamental, and the most overlooked, of all the relations that

define natural, social and cultural life. In music, he suggests, there is

significantly more exploration of melody and harmony than of rhythm.

In the broader experiential and phenomenological fields, we live within

rhythms whose measure we have barely begun to understand.

‘Rhythm enters into a general construction of time, of movement

and becoming’ (79), Lefebvre writes, his terms gathering up those of

Herbert Spencer, Henri Bergson and other ‘rhythmists’ whose writings

on the topic Lefebvre, insistent on the inaugural dimensions of his own

‘rhythmanalysis’, does not take up. To open up the longer history of

rhythm-studies, however, is to see that it has had its own patterns of

recurrence, appearing and disappearing as part of a conceptual history

whose lineaments have indeed not been fully traced. Central to this

history, and to the (re)emergences of ‘rhythmics’, are the models, or the

utopias, of an interdisciplinarity and a synaesthesia in which connections

become far more significant than divisions. As Lefebvre writes, the

6 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 3, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2005), p. 130. 7 Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore

(London: Continuum, 2004).

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(future) rhythmanalyst ‘will come to “listen” to a house, a street, a town,

as an audience listens to a symphony’.

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On Bronze

Lexxx and Gwilym Gold

Lexxx is a producer, Gwilym Gold a musician. Together they

co-developed Bronze, a new music format that builds and

transforms every aspect of a piece of music as it plays, to create

a unique version on each listen. Gwilym Gold summarises what

led to the production of Bronze.

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On Bronze Lexxx and Gwilym Gold

I realised the power of Bronze when I walked into the room to introduce

the first public playback of the piece we had been working on, Tender

Metal, and I found myself lost for words with nerves and excitement.

Although I had performed in a fair number of circumstances in my

life, I had never found myself struck this way. Never before had the

presentation to people of a piece of my music (in which I had no active

involvement, apart from to press start and stop) felt so distinctly like a

performance. Is this because in a way it was a performance? And is it

possible for more, if not all, ‘recorded’ music to exist in this way? You’re

probably wondering what I’m talking about. Let’s go back a little bit so

I can give you a start on the thinking. Coming from a background in Jazz

and improvised music, it had always seemed clear to me that a discrete

sequence of events is not necessarily what defines a song or piece. In

most circumstances, (and certainly before the advent of recorded music),

when performing a song, a musician will - rather than trying to fulfill an

exact sequence of events - be working intuitively within a set of rules.

Such rules can have a bearing on everything from the detailed nuances

to larger aesthetic decisions, depending on the parameters. A number

of factors, including the circumstances and the nature of the piece itself

will define how stringent these rules are. It is of course possible that

the rules can be so open you end up with a distinctly different piece

from one performance to the next. It is also, though, possible that if the

parameters are set in a certain way, each performance, though different

in detail, will retain some kind of identity from one performance to the

next. I would venture here to say that the identity of a song or piece lies

not in a specific sequence of events but within a margin of possibilities.

With that in mind, let’s go back to the piece I mentioned at the start,

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Tender Metal. In the early stages of production, myself and Lexxx were

using a multitude of software processes alongside a lot of performance

ideas in search of some kind of sonic aesthetic and mood to accompany

a set of songs. Although what you might call a sonic palette and some

kind of mood were building fast, it became increasingly clear that no

one performance of a song felt definitive. When ideas, sounds, rhythms

and textures were being performed and manipulated live around a song,

it often felt distinctly more vital than when listening back to recordings

of what we had done. It was also becoming apparent that the identity of

each song lay in something more undefinable than a particular sequence

of parts or sounds. It was through this process and these realisations

that it became clear that the music should exist as a performance, as

a living breathing entity and not as simply a document. It became starkly

apparent that traditional recording and presentation of this music (as

much as we love a lot of what that can be) was simply not the most

compelling way for this music to exist. The existing formats began to feel

very limiting for what we wanted to achieve. In fact, when considering

the power of the devices that most people use for listening these days

it began to feel increasingly strange to us that music formats have

developed little, fidelity and length aside, since the gramophone. That

people still go and see live music is proof enough that high-fidelity stereo

sound files are not, and should not be, the end of line for recorded music.

In many ways, our new music format Bronze was a natural extension of

other software systems developed during various production processes

to manipulate / augment / create sounds, and in fact all of these initial

pieces of software were designed for one purpose: to release things from

the ‘exact repetition’ that computers tend to impose upon a creative

work. Everything within a conventional software environment is entirely

repeatable - within any digital system, two identical inputs will both

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cause identical outputs. In the analogue domain, or with any process

outside of a computer, nothing is perfectly repeatable, which means that

throughout the thousands of processes encountered during the making

of a record, each would be significantly shaped by factors outside of one’s

control. In short, it always seemed to us that working outside of software

almost always rewarded us with something deeper, less controlled and

more unique, shaped not only by our ideas, but by all elements of chance

and randomness that exist in the real world.

It was only later, during some early experiments that we discovered that

software is also very good at performing something other than exact

repetition. Software is perfect at making impartial random decisions

- it can create the exact opposite of repetition without the biases that

human judgement imposes - software is able to reliably replicate

the chance and randomness that was missing from the existing software

we had been using. The first pieces of software were all experiments

with rhythm - applying both subtle and drastic variation to the timing

of rhythmic elements to simulate the looseness in timing you might

expect in a real performer, but applied to sounds only possible with

digital technologies. We quickly discovered that whilst pure randomness

was a great tool to introduce variation into precise systems, it was only

when combined with the influence of a human bias that this random

variation produced musical results. What we had been looking for was

a combination of factors - human creative judgement augmented by

authored random variation.

Of course terminology gets vague and difficult when talking about this

sort of thing but I hope you get the idea. I imagine everyone is pretty

familiar with and can understand why recorded music came about and

why it became so popular so quickly, but I think a more relevant question

is why that is still the case when other possibilities are now available.

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Music itself is not something you look at or touch and is not something

you can really own. Music delivery formats merely provide a vessel for

the music to live from. This is becoming even more abstracted with the

rise of music in ‘the cloud’; whatever your choice of delivery, the music

is projected into the air around you and then it is gone.

Throughout the course of creating both the album, Tender Metal and

Bronze, we were almost entirely unconcerned with the way in which

we achieved what we wanted to hear, assessing only the nature of the

listening experience. Any refinements to the software would be judged

solely on their abilities to transform the experience in a way that felt

effortless, so that the workings and process would gradually fade into

the background and only the piece would remain. This may explain

why Bronze has turned out so differently to many other generative

technologies; we were never guided by a particular functional aspect,

a specific process, or any reactive / interactive element. Instead, we

continually refined how Bronze could allow us to improve the music

we were making.

To compare the capabilities of a delivery format to a human performance

is of course a reductive and shaky comparison, but I think the point holds.

Just as physical spaces are built and rebuilt (and debated over!) should we

not be looking more closely at creating more fertile and flexible digital

spaces in which music can exist? In both cases, all that really exists of the

music is the sound while it is playing, and the impression it has left in our

head, ears and body when it stops.

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The Piano Will Tell You a Lot of Things About Music Which Aren’t True

Ronan O’Hora

Ronan O’Hora is Head of Keyboard Studies, Guildhall School of

Music and Drama and has performed throughout the world, playing

with such orchestras as the London Philharmonic, Philharmonia

Orchestra and the BBC Symphony.

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The Piano Will Tell You a Lot of Things About Music Which Aren’t True Ronan O’Hora

The piano occupies a uniquely paradoxical position amongst musical

instruments inasmuch as its outwardly two dimensional character belies

its capacity to transcend itself. As Alfred Brendel has observed it is the

only instrument which you master by subverting its nature. The duality

at the heart of the piano as demonstrated by the fact that it is both the

musical instrument best suited to the most basic utilitarian musical tasks

(accompanying communal singing, playing for aural tests etc) and at the

same time the solo instrument which has the greatest scope of artistic

expression and a repertoire equalled only by that of the orchestra.

To understand this paradox it is necessary to consider first what we

know about the essence of music. Because of its universal and subliminal

nature it is perhaps best described in terms of metaphor, and the Italian

composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni’s description of music as sonorous

air captures powerfully its all embracing and mysterious nature. In

relation to this, the piano’s seemingly concrete and precisely defined

nature seems a direct contradiction.

So which are these areas in which the piano appears to musically

misinform? Firstly, the fixed nature of the piano keys mean that what

is in truth essentially a seamless continuum of musical pitch is salami-

sliced into equidistant divisions with, seemingly, a void in between

them. One effect of this is that, when beginning to learn the piano, the

student (and those hearing the resulting efforts) is spared the sometimes

excruciating sounds resulting from the first stages of trying to master

other instruments where one has to learn how to produce sounds of

clearly defined pitch from the infinity of sonorous air in which they live.

This latter process, messy as it is, is perhaps analogous to the human

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journey from the gurgles, squeals and shrieks of a baby to defined and

articulate speech. In contrast, the piano offers an early (false) certainty

about the parameters of music which needs to be jettisoned in order

to release the instrument’s capacity for more mature and meaningful

musical expression.

Another area where the piano can blur musical reality is in its percussive

infrastructure. The fact that notes are produced by hammers hitting

strings means that it is dangerously easy to think that the beginning

of a note is always the most important part. In considering any

non-percussive instrument (or the human voice, which the foundation

of musical expression) it is a truism that a note can go wrong after it is

initiated- a moment of inattention can allow a note to go out of tune or

the timbre to change from beauty to ugliness. On a more elevated level,

any great singer or string player will continually remind us how many

times a note can be colouristically transformed and how central this is to

expressive power. On the piano, conversely, it is tempting to think the die

is cast once the note is struck and therefore to fail to listen to a note for

its full duration, which is vital for producing a true sense of musical line.

There are other elements in the piano’s makeup that, whilst they are

of obvious practical benefit, can be at least suggestively unhelpful in

musical terms. The absolute flatness of the keyboard can seem at odds

with fact that music, like any language, relies on continuous inflection

to convey its meaning. Similarly, the binary visual black and white of the

keys seems limited in an art form which cries out for the greatest range

of colouristic possibilities.

Having listed several important musical “defects” in the piano an

obvious question is begged- why on earth have so many of the greatest

composers lavished so much time and creative energy on an instrument

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that does not appear to connect as naturally as others with the organic

wellsprings of music? The answer lies in the transformative power of

the piano, its capacity to reinvent itself through its imitative capabilities.

A flute and cello can both sound beautiful but cannot sound like each

other- the piano however can sound like both (and at the same time).

Uniquely, the piano only really finds its true nature when it is imitating

other instruments or the singing voice, reminding one of Hindemith’s

dictum that the only original sound in the world is the cry of a baby

- all else is an amalgam of the various conscious and subconscious

influences we assimilate in order to find our personal voice. The piano’s

vast range of register, colour, articulation and timbre (extended further

more by the extra dimension added by the sustaining pedal) make it the

ideal solo vehicle for the greatest range of musical expression, and the

myriad possibilities available in the piano to combine different sounds

suggestively allows for an inexhaustible creative challenge and inspiration

to composer and performer alike.

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Good Homes for Art

Richard Sennett

Richard Sennett is Founder of Theatrum Mundi, Professor

of Sociology at New York University and the London School of

Economics and Political Science. He writes about cities, labour,

and culture, his books include Together: The Rituals, Pleasures

and Politics of Cooperation (2012), The Craftsmen (2009)

and The Fall of Public Man (1977).

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Good Homes for Art Richard Sennett

In June 2012, I attended at the Barbican Centre in London a revival

of Einstein on the Beach. This five-hour, multi-media collage of music,

dance, and scene-making first appeared at New York’s Brooklyn Academy

of Music in 1978, setting a Wagnerian standard for modern performance

art. Among its other provocations, Einstein encouraged people to wander

in and out at will during its five hours—take a coffee or cigarette break or,

today, check your mobile phone.

This invitation to the audience is a small signal of a much more sweeping

idea about the experience of theatre. Today, we want to draw performer

and public closer together than in the past; in particular, modern ideas

of performance space seek to break the rigid, nineteenth century

etiquette of a passive, silent, still spectator focused on the stage; instead

modern performing stages celebrate informality. Dancers, musicians,

and actors routinely do pre- and post-performance chats; again, when

I was a working musician forty years ago, we never spoke to the audience

during a performance, while today young musicians sometimes act like

talk-show hosts onstage. Informality has a political undertow: because

experience in the theatre is looser, it seems freer, and therefore

more democratic.

There’s an architectural side to loosening up, drawing closer the

performer and the public. Informality is a quality designers seek by

breaking down the boundaries between stage and street, by designing

theatres which are intimately related to their surroundings in the city.

I’m going to explore this informalising, melding impulse, both inside and

outside the concert hall. I’ll show how designers work with two issues

to make relaxed homes for art; in technical jargon, achieving this goal

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involves the design of porosity and of presence. I’ll show how these

architectural concepts apply particularly to music venues. But I want to

conclude with some reasons why, even so, a good home for art should

not feel like your own home.

The Temple of Art

The first thing to be said about the impulse to experience art informally

is that it is nothing new. In eighteenth century theatres people chatted

amongst themselves or munched on the odd chicken-drumstick during

the course of a performance, they wandered Einstein-fashion in and

out of theatres at will, yet were also deeply engaged with the drama or

music performed whenever they attended to it, shouting out comments

to actors or calling musicians to repeat a movement, aria, or even a

particularly choice phrase. Informal meant engaged, with the audience

in control.

Performing artists increasingly took back control as the nineteenth

century progressed. Even in Beethoven’s day efforts were made to

stop audiences talking while musicians were playing. The advent of

gas-light in the nineteenth century meant it became easier to darken

the hall and light up the stage, and so focus audiences on the performer

rather than on each other. As the size of concert halls increased,

so did their impersonality; by the time of the Palais Garnier in Paris

and the Ringstrasse theatres built in Vienna, these halls were truly

monumental edifices in which thousands of people attended in the

dark, silent and unmoving, to the art of a relative few or to just a single

individual.

Changes in the status of the performer were bound up with these

theatres. The performer’s status rose; this was particularly true by the

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1830s for musicians, who in that age of high Romanticism were more

treated as seers than as servants of the public. If you believed, as Victor

Hugo did, that ‘music is our window on the soul,’ then it became possible

to declare, as did Franz Liszt, that ‘the concert is … myself.’ The technical

demands of music in the Romantic era helped widen the gulf between

artist and public; an amateur pianist can sort of scrape his or her way

through a Mozart sonata, but is defeated at the outset by the Liszt b-flat

sonata: the artist inhabits a sound world you cannot. This gulf translated

into theatre architecture like in the mystische Abgrund Wagner designed

for Bayreuth; a leather hood covers the pit so that unseen and ‘mystically’

the orchestral sound floats into the hall.

For dramatists like Brecht early in the twentieth century, or choreographers

like Tino Sehgal early in the twenty-first century, making performing

spaces more informal is their refusal of the Romantic cult of the supreme

artist; they want to take down the temple of art, and to return to the

spectator his or her primacy, such as existed in the eighteenth century.

For modern theatre architects, it’s not so much a matter of either-or,

a question of who is in control. Rather, informality has translated into

two truly vexing problems, those of designing porosity and presence.

Porosity

This word means in design making the skin of a building porous between

the inside and outside; a sky-scraper with a ground-level entrance is

not porous, a sky-scraper with many entries and exits on the ground

is. Porosity has come to be associated also with flexibility, so that space

inside and outside can be configured and reconfigured in many ways.

That combination of permeable and flexible has particularly marked the

modern design of performing-arts spaces.

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An example comes from projects of the architect Andrew Todd, who has

worked for a long time with the director Peter Brook, and who recently

made an enormous performing-arts space on the docks of Marseilles.

Here’s a prototype of a new, simple structure, made entirely of sheets

of high-tech plywood, meant for dance, music, or theatre, flexible

and porous in character, since the panels can easily be re-configured

inside and outside and allow people to move around free before, during,

and after a performance. One virtue of this theatre is that you can

dismantle the panels, load them on a flat-bed truck, and take the theatre

anywhere. Florian Beigel’s Half Moon Theatre in Mile End Road in London

is a fixed structure similarly seeking to create a porous relation between

the street and the stage.

When the doors are open in structures like these two, musical

performance radically changes its character for those listening outside;

reverberation return – the reflection from walls of sound coming back

to the listeners – diminishes, and the music heard outside begins to mix

with ambient sounds in the environment. If you are a composer like Brian

Eno, who works with ambiance expressively, that’s fine, but would you

like to listen to Schubert’s Winterreise mixed in with honking autos or,

more kindly, accompanied by birds singing at dusk? Perhaps indeed you

would; my own most intense experience of this song cycle occurred lying

on the grass outside a rehearsal studio with its doors open, looking up

at the stars while the music floated out into the night. In any event,

this is the kind of question that informal architecture poses to listening.

There are ways of creating a sense of visual porosity even while hewing

to the theatre as an acoustically sealed space. A brilliant example is 

Eric Parry’s new music hall made in Wells. Parry is perhaps best-known

as the architect who has remade the St. Martins-in-the-Fields complex

in London. In Wells, by sinking the stage below grade and surrounding

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the hall with windows at grade level, Parry seeks to make the listener

aware of the outside even when insulated from its sounds.

The tie between inside and outside that modern design seeks is an

urbanistic as well as architectural matter, which means the role a building

plays in its surroundings. The Barbican Centre in London exemplifies

ground-zero in this regard, a perfect example of how not to make a good

modern home for art in the city. Its concert halls are buried deep inside

a housing complex that in turn shuns any embrace of the surrounding

city; these are dungeons for art. By contrast, the terracing surrounding

the South Bank Centre in London, a renewal project of many hands, now

embraces the outside, and promotes informal lounging about, eating,

skate-boarding, shopping for books, and the like, even though the South

Bank architect is of the same concrete-brutalist sort as the Barbican.

An exemplary American example of drawing in the public is the renovation

done by Elizabeth Diller of Alice Tully Hall, the chamber music venue

for the Lincoln Centre in New York. The glasswork here is particularly

impressive in dissolving the divide between inside and outside, even

though Tully Hall itself remains an artificially-lit closed chamber;

a particularly nice touch is the ‘prough’ on the street which creates

an outdoor sitting space looking in.

‘Porosity’ has become a visual benchmark for success in designing

cultural centres; free-flow seems to be a card inviting the public to

hang out on a Sunday afternoon at these places. Sponsors have hoped,

moreover, that informal space will draw new audiences to artistic events

within. Even in a rarefied venue like Tully Hall, devoted to classical

chamber music, this can in fact happen, as when a young man encrusted

with nose, lip, and ear studs told me at an evening devoted to songs

of Duparc and Faure that he was ‘checking out‘  what was on offer. But

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the design of ‘presence’ for a performing arts space works against such

hopes; it involves technical issues which work against porosity.

The Design of Presence

‘Presence’ means feeling engaged right here, right now; in the theatre

it can feel something like sitting expectantly on the edge of your seat;

‘right here, right now’ is the sensation philosophers name ‘immanence.’

In music, the technological revolution of our times seems to take away

that urgent immediacy.

I’ve about two thousand CDs downloaded on my Apple iTunes; this

music is instantly available to me whenever I want to listen, which I do

intently on airplanes, but casually when doing the dishes or reading

the newspapers. To the critic Walter Benjamin, the modern ‘age of

mechanical reproduction’ threatens to diminish the gripping power –

what he called the ‘aura’ – of art, so that music in particular is reduced

to mere ambient background, Mozart becoming like sonic wall-paper.

What does live performance do for us that Apple iTunes cannot? What

is presence about in a live performance? One element is contrary to the

ethic of relaxed informality. Anxiety rules many if not most performers

back-stage before a performance: will he or she suffer a memory lapse?

An equal, if more subterranean, unease pervades the audience: will

someone suffer a heart attack, or just as bad, will a mobile phone go off?

Paradoxically, tensions of these sorts contribute to the sense of occasion,

of presence, on both sides of the footlights. Uncertainty plays a positive

role in making performance come alive – which is why many musicians

prefer to make live recordings, even though they could achieve more

surgically-precise results in the recording studio.

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For the designer, though, presence involves calculating certainties in

the theatre. We’ve seen the problem of sound rebound appear in Andrew

Todd’s design for a knock-down theatre. More technically, in one aspect

this involves the ‘initial time-delay gap,’ a phenomenon first studied

by the mid-twentieth century acoustician Leo Beranek. This is the

gap between the initial arrival of sound to a listener’s ears and its first

reflections from the other surfaces in a room. The gap is good, since it

provides us the sense of being enveloped stereophonically by sound, as

one acoustician puts it by feeling ‘inside’ the sound rather than outside

‘observing it through a window.’

How long should this gap be? In great nineteenth century venues

like Boston’s Symphony hall, it was more than 2.2 seconds; in a small

venue like King’s Place in London, it can be reduced to under 1.5 seconds.

New materials in the walls, ceiling, and floors today help acoustic

designers like Paul Gillieron manipulate the ‘initial time-delay gap;’ others

who remade the New York State theatre in 1999 provided compensating

resonance by hidden electronic means, a much-debated ‘wired live’

technique.

The point here is that we are designing presence in ways which are

flexible yet anything but informal. Artifice provides the sensation of

immediacy; calculation produces presence. Once his or her nerves are

conquered, I’d say a great singer is as much the designer of presence,

of the gripping moment, as is the acoustician. In theatre design,

moreover, we are trying to manipulate phenomena like the initial time-

delay gap to unify time and space in the hall; you feel in your ears more

fully what you see onstage. With the result that the players loom larger

in our experience, as close to us sonically as visually.

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Seeing clearly is the other way architects seek to design presence.

Rather than perforating a membrane, as in porous design, the goal here

is to make all visual obstacles between disappear, to remove any hint

of a membrane or visual filter. As with acoustics, the designer needs

to cope with the propensities of the spectator’s body, notably its cone

of vision. Human eyes can focus on objects as coherent ensembles

within a 60-degree cone but stages permit people to use only the upper

half of this cone, seeing 30 degrees around. Still, were an auditorium

entirely and evenly lit, the eye would take a lot of material extraneous to

the stage. We can use lighting to focus the view; by seeing less fully, they

can concentrate more. Yet there is a more difficult issue of visual intimacy

which architects deal with in terms of sight lines.

The interior of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden is a prime example

of the traditional horse-shoe theatre; by the late seventeenth century in

northern Italy this kind of theatre became nearly synonymous with opera

as an art form. The social idea embedded in the horse-shoe is that the

audience has as clear a sight of itself as of the stage – but only some of

itself. You were meant to see rulers in a high, central royal box, aristocrats

in lesser boxes ringing them; stalls in the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries were for fashion-spectators of a lesser rank; no one look up to

the masses of poor people in the amphitheatres, who had poor views of

the stage and no view of the kings, aristocrats, and fashionables below.

One extreme corrective to the status-bound sight-line is the Teatro Della

Compagnia designed by Adolfo Natalini for Florence in 1987. The sight-

lines here are all orientated forward rather than laterally, giving an equally

clear view of the stage and no view of your neighbour; the few boxes to

the side are the cheapest seats in the house because vision is restricted.

It’s in my judgement a bare, grim space of visual equality, rescued outside

by its discrete insertion into the street-fabric of Florence. An opposite

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extreme is theatre in the round – more usually today theatre in the

square – where audiences sit on three or four sides and players either fill

in the centre space or complete the fourth side, as a modern adaptation

of the old Elizabethan thrust stage. In this solution to the socially-

exclusive sight-lines, the audience is put on an equal footing, seeing

each other equally clearly, but at a price; the experience of connection

is diminished, at least in musical performances.

Whereas actors and dancers can feel comfortable filling up the central

space theatre, moving around constantly, musicians are stationary

creatures. Thus, if you are performing dead-centre, half the audience

sees you in profile, or worse, has a clear sight only of your back. If you

perform at an open slide, many in the audience will have to twist their

necks to see you, which is not comfortable for long periods of time;

people start to twist and squirm in their seats.

Banishing social hierarchy is a good idea in general, but is visual democracy

what theatre is all about? Natalini’s theatre is a rigidly uniform version

of equality; there’s no mutual awareness. Theatre in the square is looser

in form, and the audience is much more aware of one another on

the same footing, yet in a musical performance the players as well as

the audience pay a price for this kind of equality; the difficulties of sight-

lines diminish his or her own presence.

The design of porosity and of presence show that intimacy is full of

ambiguity and inconsistency – this is as true onstage as it is in bed.

Moreover, there’s an argument to be made against drawing performer

and audience too close, not a Romantic argument about the supremacy

of art, but one based on the ordinary, universal experience of performing.

I’ll conclude by showing what it means in the design of stages.

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Distance

The eighteenth century philosopher Denis Diderot was the first to argue

that a certain distance between performer and public is necessary for a

musician or act to do his work well. Diderot advances this view in a brief

essay, The Paradox of Acting; he writes that the performer has to learn

to manage his or her own emotions, listening to the music he or she

makes and judging it, without being swept away as an audience might

be. Which is perhaps just to say, performing requires self-control. But

Diderot goes a step further: the musician needs to learn to relax on stage,

to banish nerves; that, too, can be achieved only by stepping back from

the public, forgetting that a thousand people are listening — a matter

of feeling alone with oneself on stage, free from self-consciousness.

These two elements, listening to oneself critically and banishing

nerves, combine to create Diderot’s paradox, embodied in the phrase

‘expressive distance.’

It’s a phrase which translates into action. People fortunate enough to

hear Arthur Rubinstein play saw a man who put everything into his

hands, made no facial grimaces, conveyed, as he once said to me, that

‘in public I am still alone with the music; the audience is both there

and far away.’ Diderot’s paradox. Pianists who move around a lot when

they are playing, like Martha Argerich, are releasing tension; she says she

does it to relax her body rather than show the audience how much she

is feeling. Diderot’s paradox.

For actors, the wearing of a mask is an artifice which can particularly aide

in relaxing the body. The mime/dramaturge Jacques Lecoq explored how

to make this happen in modern theatre by contriving a neutral mask for

performers. He trained first fellow mimes and then actors like Ariane

Mnoutchkine to release their bodies by wearing this mask, pouring all

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their energy into hand, arm, and leg movements – the actor’s equivalent

of Rubenstein at the piano. The formal, rigid mask enabled them to

perform more expressively.

The current ethos of informality and intimacy treats such impersonal

behaviour as cold. But if formality distances people, it also can join them

together in rituals, which are a kind of shared performance. Think of

taking Communion; anyone can do it, but they have to do it just right; the

rules of the ritual have to be rigorously observed. In secular rituals, too,

distance and rigor rule, as in the dressing up for a performance. Though

traditional concert tuxes for men are a nightmare, with their vented

armpits and strangling bow ties — still, we want to dress up in some way

for the occasion; dressing up is part of the ritual of performing. Indeed,

the rituals of dressing up, silence, and stillness are behaviours which

link the audience to the performer, and these formalities heighten the

experience of music; no one puts on a suit to listen to a CD at home, and

in that ritual-less state the music is less gripping / by chance, informally.

These, then, are reasons for thinking of the theatre or concert hall as

a special place in which Diderot’s paradox comes to life and in which a

formal ritual envelops our experience of art. The cult of informality, with

its dark sister ‘accessibility’ – so favoured by arts administrators – may

actually do damage to art. This view would argue against much of the

current effort in design to make good homes for the performing arts.

How could the alternative, art as ritual, translate into physical space?

One stunning traditional model haunts the modern imagination of how

to create such a space: Richard Wagner’s creation of a theatre at Bayreuth,

a temple devoted to his own operas designed to lift the audience out

of its everyday pre-occupations. Let’s glance briefly at one physical

move he made to create this temple to art: it is the leather-covered hood

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he placed over the orchestra pit, a device he named mystische Abgrund, 

the mystical abyss. This device creates a physical, impenetrable distance

between audience and orchestral performer; the orchestral sound

comes from somewhere un-seeable, seeming to envelope the theatre

magically. The Wagner hood was a musical equivalent of the Lecoq

mask. Indeed, the hood has Lecoq-like effects on the performer. Playing

underneath this hood was in my day an almost unbearably sweaty

experience; still, protected from the public, we felt a certain freedom

to do the arduous work Wagner demanded of us, focused on the music

alone. Bayreuth also created a physical mis-en-scene for audiences, like

its hard benches, which made people feel that they were at a demanding

occasion; unlike the Einstein performances, there was no physical relief.

The temple of art is the traditional model, and I’m not arguing that we

should return to it, either in its physical details or its mystique. I am saying

that there are good reasons for thinking that the porous, informal spaces

designers want to make today may miss something essential about the

experience of performance. There must be a way to combine the visual

virtues of porosity and the clarity of sight lines with Diderot’s idea of

expressive distance, combine these architecture virtues with the ritual

character of musical performance. I’d like to conclude by talking about

just one musical space which does in fact reconcile the visual virtues of

openness and informality with the peculiar experience of making and

listening to music.

This is Hans Scharoun’s Philharmonie in Berlin. The sight-lines problem is

brilliantly resolved so that the audience can see one another equally, yet

focus on the stage. Acoustically, the hall is a marvel; without Wagnerian

trickery, the sound appears to come from everywhere. Perhaps the most

experimental aspect of Scharoun’s design is its version of porosity; the

theatre can be entered in many ways, and the building reaches tentacles,

37

as it were, to the outside, yet, for ease of access, a clear differentiation

is made between stage and street. Like Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall in Los

Angeles, which is the architectural child of the Berlin Philharmonie,

the specialness of an open, easily penetrable space is emphasised.

As an urbanist, I believe that informal, often messy conditions are key

in bringing streets to life. As a one-time performer and now listener,

I’ve come to appreciate that music requires more formal and hermetic

space. The architectural issues touched on here, reflect a much greater

problem: what kind of community do we experience in art? Perhaps,

opposed to the dictum the more informal, the more mutually engaged,

we need to contemplate another version of community in the performing

arts: the more formal the roles of performer and spectator become,

the more they are bound together.1

1 Originally published on the Theatrum Mundi blog www.theatrum-mundi.org/blog

38

List of participants

Iain Burnside

Lexxx Dromgoole

Paul Gillieron

Gwilym Gold

Peter Gregson

Edwin Heathcote

Mark Hoare

Sandra Jasper

Adam Kaasa

Asif Khan

Amanda Levete

Hana Loftus

Hamish Macpherson

Laura Marcus

Preetha Narayanan

Ronan O’Hora

Eric Parry

Sunand Prasad

Mark Prescott

Amaara Raheem

Edward Ridge

Nick Ryan

Richard Sennett

Matthew Skjonsberg

Filipe Sousa

Tobias Stürmer

Hayden Thorpe

Andrew Todd

Steve Tompkins

Stephen Witherford

Editor

Kiera Blakey, Programme Coordinator,

Theatrum Mundi

Assistant Editor

Adam Kaasa, London Manager,

Theatrum Mundi

Contributions

Lexxx Dromgoole and Gwilym Gold,

Ronan O’Hora, Laura Marcus,

Richard Sennett

With thanks to

James Anderson, Catarina Heeckt,

Jude Kelly, Tessa Norton,

Joanthan Reekie, Andrew Todd

Design

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Contact

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